Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Required

• You independently identify the right solution to ambiguous, open-ended problems. Problems reach you before they're fully defined, and the environment's constraints are discovered, not documented; you investigate, form a design, and deliver without waiting for a spec.
• You know the difference between what you can do alone and what you should do with help, and you actively use Arlington specialists as a resource without being dependent on them for every decision.
• You respond with urgency to operational issues and own resolution within your sphere. You're unafraid to call an incident when the signal warrants it.
• You proactively create and update runbooks and documentation for the components you own. In an environment the rest of the team can't access, what you write down is what they know.
• You understand the customer and the mission well enough to know which work has the greatest impact, and you redirect your focus when what you're doing isn't moving the needle.
• You tailor your communication to your audience, whether that's a product engineer in Arlington, a DevSecOps teammate, or a non-technical customer stakeholder, and you proactively share information so the right people stay informed and aligned.
• You're comfortable operating in secure environments where tooling is limited, internet access is not a given, and the stakes are real.
• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial time owning services or applications running in production.
• Strong generalist programming ability in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript, writing code that remote teammates can review, extend, and trust.
• Experience building and shipping backend services or full-stack features end to end: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operation.
• Experience debugging production systems: reading logs, tracing failures across components, and root-causing issues under time pressure.
• Working operational fluency: Linux command line, containerized environments (Docker, Docker Compose), and enough observability tooling skill to monitor and operate what you ship.